A Call from the Neighbors

In the green valleys around Birmingham, Ala. one night last week, some 60 of the neighbors piled into their cars and started out to make some calls. In Brookside, Steve Marshlar was doing his usual business, serving whites and Negroes food and drinks in segregated areas of his dilapidated cafe. Marshlar is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Into his cafe marched the neighbors. They were garbed in white robes, masks and hoods.

They drove a score of frightened Negroes outside, where a cross was burning brightly in the Alabama night. "You've got to keep these niggers down," the neighbors warned Steve Marshlar. One of them told Steve's sister-in-law: "We're tired of the Catholics running this town." Then the night callers got back in their cars and drove away.

A few miles away, Mrs. Hugh McDanal, 42, dressed in nightgown and slippers, was talking to a friend on the telephone. Her truck-driver husband was away on a night run. There were sounds of footsteps on the porch and men's voices demanding to be let in. She screamed for the friend to call the police, and grabbed a shotgun. The neighbors rushed in, slugged her and wrested her gun away. She snatched off several of their hoods. "We could kill you for that," one told her. They dragged her outside to watch a cross burning on the front lawn. Mrs. McDanal later reported that they lectured her for using her house "to bring men & women together and to sell whisky," which she denied.

They threatened to return and bomb Mrs. McDanal's neat white house, or burn it down, "if we hear anything else." Then the neighbors piled into their 16 cars, having no more advice to dispense that night, and rode home to their beds.

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